A bipolar perspective on the 3rd planet

Month

July 2016

When I was a kid I watched a lot of B movies. One scene from one movie stuck in my mind.

“Why don’t you show yourselves?” is the challenge from a human.

A spider scuttles by. Instinctively, the human squashes it with his foot.

“Why did you kill that creature?” asks the disembodied voice of the alien.

They engage in a thoughtful dialogue about disgust and otherness. Hell is the other.

“You would find us just as strange. You would fear our form. That is why we remain hidden.”

There is a moral duty some may recognise. It is the duty to investigate, not to reject. To understand, not to revile. To take on our superficial instincts. It is a collective moral duty. The only punishment for failure falls upon the human race.

A socially inept 25 year old white male, effectively a recluse. I think it is uncontroversial to say that such a person requires help. What is his personality disorder? Is he on the autism spectrum?

The isolated 25 year old sends out vile abuse and death threats to a campaigning feminist and a female MP using the only power he has. He has the internet and he has his maleness.

The feminist campaigner suffers especially greatly. The pressure of the verbal abuse and threats she receives is traumatic.

The troll goes to jail. Socially inept, reclusive. What “friends” does he make?

He comes out of prison. He now feels he belongs, he has friends… those friends are neo-nazis. Are you surprised? Was it his duty to resist? Is it not our duty to make sure he wasn’t put there to begin with? Are we going to throw him back?

He is now 28. He sends out more vile abuse. Again to a female MP. He is arrested and many are glad.

I am not glad. No-one has been helped here. There is no efficiency in any respect in the process. All that happens is that the status quo is preserved. The materially powerful have their power reinforced. The whole thing not only perpetuates but drives inequality.

His name is John Nimmo. Who cares about this bug?

“White males have all the power”. A million times no. Some white males have most of the power. Being white and male are privileges, great social advantages, but it is only the superficial, the prejudiced, would think those traits outweigh the disadvantages of being a bug, squashable, an “example”, maladjusted, unloveable.

​Fear of the 70s & 80s when I feel the cultural moment we will obviously revisit is the 60s. Did you catch Jeremy Corbyn’s Bob Dylan reference on The Andrew Marr show?

I know going back 25 years a musician and a writer, two brothers, on one side of the rift and a Local Govt thinker, manager & political commentator on the other. Perhaps too late for anyone to stop the Labour Party splitting but our connections all the more vital for it. My mind goes back to LSD and a treasure hunt in 1991. Our mini sixties revival. I think the next one will be bigger: a new politics with deeper exploration into the psyche and culture, deeper into our myths. Stronger narratives, better connections to the culture of the public. That to me seems the only progressive hope.

That may all seem oblique but it is that looseness, the mind slowing up but focused politically, beyond the automatic, beyond the dry and the groove, that we need to bring us together and reach out – through culture – across generations and transform the pomp of our political spaces into more welcoming places.

Doesn’t Chilcot suggest that a Magritte might be as apt a painting in the chambers where decisions are made as austere portraits and echoes of an imperial tradition?

Seems to me our political selves and our cultural selves are too divided still and for a lot of us that means letting go rather than holding on so tightly we find there’s nothing in our hand.

Imagine division to a new order meant you were a protest singer. I can laugh about antichrist now, relax and let your mind float on down the stream… It is not dying. Get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hanD – in the beginning. Don’t ask for mine. GOT TO GET YOU INTO MY LIFE…

“Think tanks should take drugs”.Fixing a hole. What have we learned? Consent. Feminism. The rest is beyond your command.

And as the old road rapidly fades, peel back the woodchip, Idiot Wind. Don’t ask for mine. I’d Love To Turn You On.